Nagisa Oshima is a well-known representative of Japanese "New Wave" cinema and a controversial director in the history of Japanese cinema. From the most well-known Merry Christmas on the Battlefield, to The Kingdom of the Senses, which depicts lust (Editor's Note: also translated as The World of the Senses, which is the title of the book), to Ritual and Death By Hanging, which are critical of Japanese militarism, his films are varied in style and have a unique personality, but almost all of the subjects of his works have anti-traditional ideas. How do you summarize Nagisa Oshima's creative theme? What is his place in the history of Japanese cinema? The following is an excerpt from "Nagisa Oshima and Japan" with the permission of the publishing house, and has been deleted from the original text.
"Nagisa Oshima and Japan", by Inuhiko Shikatada, translated by Chifina, peiwen | Peking University Press, January 2022.
Make a movie from the standpoint of the moment
Most of the famous masters in the history of cinema have formed their own styles, so even if you only peek at the scales and claws of the film, you can guess which director it is from. For example, Eisenstein formed a narrative poetic spiritual exploration through small lens grouping and repetition; Yasujiro Ozu was completely deviated from the audiovisual language of classical Hollywood, forming a low camera position and a positive gaze painting style; Andreopoulos, who had a deep personal relationship with Nagisa Oshima, poetically showed multiple time and space in a long and complex choreography. So, is there a style in Nagisa Oshima that rivals these directors and can be easily read? The answer to this question is simply incomprehensible.
There are many variations in the style of his life, and each style is close to the extreme, and he strives to pursue the critical point where each style is full and about to collapse, but he is not at all limited to it, and immediately devotes himself to creating another directing style and editing order in the next work. He's such a director. Some critics have been shunning Nagisa Oshima because they are shackled by a simple axis of coordinates intertwined with thematic theories and allegories, and the whole of Nagisa Oshima cannot be imagined in their minds. So, is there no element that runs through Nagisa Oshima's feature films and documentaries? The answer is no.
Japanese director Nagisa Oshima.
First of all, we need only think that the narrations of Rokuhiro Toura, Founder Komatsu, Shoichi Ozawa, or Nagisa Oshima himself in his films are so sonorous and powerful, and occasionally even exist as a provocative narrator. In The Forgotten Imperial Army, Ninja Martial Arts Tent, and Hanging Death, it is the rough and confident voice that determines the tone of the entire film. There is only one way to comprehensively understand Oshima's works, and that is to compare the stumbling monologues of the young protagonist of "The Boy" with the above sonorous and powerful voices. Where the sound coincides with the sound, there is a song. Nagisa Oshima's actors sing and sing at every opportunity, which is the essence of Oshima Nagisa's style.
Second, let's look at his scene scheduling. Recall that the camera in "Night and Fog in Japan" quietly entered a certain room, without leaving a dead end, photographed all corners of the room from the center to the periphery, as if to use the power of scene scheduling to prompt the disintegration of the hypocritical banquet that people were engaged in in the room. Surprisingly, in this film, Nagisa Oshima shows the conflict of multiple layers of time and space with only one shot earlier than Angelopoulos.
However, Nagisa Oshima never clings to the style of scene scheduling she adopts. In The Devil of The Day, which he completed six years later, he used about four times as many shots as the average feature film to show the expansion of vision, the shift of viewpoints, and the occlusion of gaze. From "Japanese Spring Song Examination" to "The Returning Drunkard", he constantly broke away from the complete story framework and reached the peak of absurdity in "The Diary of a Thief in Shinjuku". But in the 1978 film "The Undead of Love", this experimentality is completely absent, and he only uses a solid and complete narrative to tell the fantasy plot. In "Imperial Law Degree", he seems to be deliberately showing, using retro techniques in the opening and subtitles, adding irony to the beginning of the one-sided story.
Stills from the movie "Imperial Law".
Finally, there are no homages, deconstructions, or allusions to classic films that fascinate fans. Nagisa Oshima often claims to have no interest in referring to the history of cinema, and has always made films from the standpoint of the present. Many people have embarked on the path of film directing because they were deeply touched by watching a classic work, but Nagisa Oshima is not this way at all - if the fact that the "Undead of Love" roughly alludes to the pre-war Sakato Wife Saburo's film "The Life of Unable to Relax" as a rare exception. At a certain time, Nagisa Oshima wrote articles to pay attention to Godard as soon as he had the opportunity, as if he were pointing a needle to The Wheat Man with Godard, and constantly carried out pioneering video experiments. I have to say that in terms of production attitude, contrary to Godard's senior fan-style director, I am afraid that there is no one else in Oshima Nagisa. As you may recall, Lumiere, the film research journal that was in the 1980s, ignored Nagisa Oshima, who was in the same era, and that's why.
Nagisa Oshima's film theme,
There are many undeniable fault lines
If you comb through the trajectory of the times, it is clear at a glance that in the eyes of Nagisa Oshima as a director, the most important thing is not the style of the film, but the changes according to the requirements of the theme. On the one hand, his style always shifts from one extreme to the other; but on the other hand, in stark contrast, his subjects are always extremely soothing and constantly evolving. But, as we've already clarified in previous chapters, there are undeniable faults in his subjects.
In the early stages of his commitment to Shochiku, Nagisa Oshima most cherished the difference between the idealistic past and reality. Some people will stop at nothing to live in a repressive reality, and some people can't be so tenacious that they eventually self-destruct, and there is a constant and tragic struggle between these two groups of people. "Night and Fog in Japan" depicts this kind of struggle. However, it is precisely because of this magnificent film that shows the conflict between the past and the present, Nagisa Oshima was swept out by Shochiku.
After a period of temporary silence as a feature film director, Nagisa Oshima confronted the grand theme of "facing the other." No, it's not so much a face as it is a compliance, and he's caught up in it, whether he wants it or not. The other first appeared in a very conceptual form in "Feeding", and since "Lee Yun-fu's Diary" in the form of a Korean in this figurative form. In "The Forgotten Imperial Army," he confronts disabled Soldiers of Korean descent who have been stripped of their Japanese citizenship and are living on the streets, and in "The Diary of Lee Yoon-fuk," he confronts Seoul under the Park Chung-hee regime shortly after the establishment of diplomatic relations between Japan and South Korea. In the mid to late 1960s, he shot a variety of films on Koreans in Japan. His work on Koreans in Japan has finally shifted from documentary to comedy. Moreover, using these others as mirrors, he gradually exposed the scandals that Japanese society had been hiding and sealing, and tortured them one by one on the screen.
In 1968, Nagisa Oshima received a decisive turnaround. He was able to temporarily break away from the cursed story of Japan, and use "Shonen" as an opportunity to expand his horizons to the whole of Japan on the one hand, and on the other hand, to stare sharply at the metropolis of Tokyo, which existed as a chaotic body at that time. By working with unknown teenagers, he summed up the practice of "gazing at the everyday scene of the city" and attached great importance to its political nature. The series of everyday scenes depicted in The Secret History of the Tokyo War after the War means that Nagisa Oshima temporarily leaves the timeline of history to face the horrors of the continuous and infinite extension of space. It is also the state in which Nagisa Oshima further explores the state of national reality that he conceptualized in "Hanging Death".
Stills from the movie "Hanging death".
However, the exploration of the scene is interrupted by "The Youth", and Nagisa Oshima returns to the historical axis. "Ritual" tries to give a perfect rest to Oshima's entire thematic system up to this point. Since the 1970s after Ritual, he has begun to confront the existential other, that is, women, who are difficult to observe on the axis of history. Women are completely liberated from the self-control of "The Devil of the Day", King's Landing in "The Kingdom of the Senses" and "The Undead of Love", and frankly subverts the male perspective and worldview, guiding them to the world of love and death. In previous topical works such as "Japanese Spring Song Examination", we can see his attitude of trying to explain the sexual impulse in the historical context or social context, but this attitude has no trace in "Sensory Kingdom", which is also the most characteristic place in "Sensory Kingdom".
With 1970 as the watershed, Nagisa Oshima began to shift from desire to pleasure. The theme of the "forbidden other" is even expanded to a biological level in Max, My Love. But, on the one hand, this direct face to the "sexual other" has become more essential; on the other hand, Nagisa Oshima has also relentlessly explored the internal structure of patriarchal society.
Japanese films of the 1960s unconsciously depicted the inner workings of the same-sex social collective, and in Merry Christmas on the Battlefield and Mitsuru, he calmly showed that this situation actually has a homophobic nature. Having said that, we can't judge the Imperial Decree from this "sexual framework" alone. It should not be overlooked that it is also the film in which Nagisa Oshima returns to Kyoto. In this sense, the importance of his 1991 documentary Kyoto, My Mother's Land cannot be overemphasized. It was Kyoto that cut off the time and space of post-war Japan.
For a director who makes films on an international scale, the city is the intimate and love-hate secret garden he has kept to the end. The documentary illustrates that Kyoto, a city that is expressed as a metaphor for the mother's womb, has gradually become an insignificant place for both her mother and Nagisa Oshima herself. This fact, which is both luscious and sad, is the first time that Nagisa Oshima expresses a quiet lament for the so-called concept of the past. If "Ritual" depicts modern Japan through a powerful patriarchal nature, then it can be said that the other pillar of the family he has been ignoring, motherhood, is successfully repaid through "Kyoto, My Mother's Land" like a debt accumulated over the years. The above is the change of Nagisa Oshima's works observed from the side of the theme.
Stills from the movie Ritual.
Nagisa Oshima's revolutionary role in the history of Japanese cinema
Let's take a little longer to look at Nagisa Oshima and see what role he played in the huge narrative system of postwar Japanese film history. Having said that, I don't want to discuss the boring topic of whether he is a giant who rivals Kenji Mizoguchi or Akira Kurosawa. For this reason, it is enough to point out one point in advance, that is, the myth of the great master nowhere in the world exists. The so-called giants are nothing more than the stupid nostalgia of repeating the "ten years at a time". Nor am I trying to publicize how great Nagisa Oshima is— he overcame his small-scale production situation in Japan to go to the Cannes Film Festival, and thus became an internationally renowned and long-term observer of foreign researchers. Because, whether from the perspective of production or from the perspective of market tolerance, internationalization is no longer a problem, and it is inevitable to evaluate Nagisa Oshima with internationalization. Below, we discuss the truly revolutionary role played by Nagisa Oshima in the history of Japanese cinema in six points.
1. Regardless of the occasion, Nagisa Oshima is an out-and-out critic and a great critic.
Nagisa Oshima criticized the wartime Japanese press system and exposed the hypocrisy of the myth of rebellion at his alma mater, Kyoto University; "The Forgotten Imperial Army" criticized postwar Japan for stripping people of their nationality from the old colonies and abandoning them without compensation; "The Devil of the Day" exposed the hypocrisy and hypocrisy of postwar democracy; "Kingdom of the Senses" exposed the hypocrisy of the national hierarchy wrapped up in the concept of obscenity itself. The cynicism of the young man itself is what he hates most.
He is not only critical, but also fiercely provoking the audience. That being said, his incendiary style is very different from that of his contemporaries, Shuji Terayama. Shuji Terayama argues pompously that the so-called history ultimately comes down to personal melodrama, so he specializes in depicting the younger generation, converging on provocations to the audience in a staged structure. Nagisa Oshima, on the other hand, is constantly obsessed with the Japanese concept, and he strongly opposes and pursues who should bear moral responsibility for concealing history and mythologizing history. Because of this, the presence of North Koreans has to be mentioned so often.
Oshima-nagisa's critique sometimes explodes like a clockwork, crashing to the ground in a grandeur of disorder, to the point of showing unprecedented absurdity. "Forced to Die in Love" is the most typical of The Summer of Japan, which imitates the time when the people present held a banquet that had neither purpose nor political value, and the result of the chanting was to take up a gun and revolt. By the way, Nagisa Oshima is not acting as a mysterious director, but in the form of a real body that causes trouble. The troublemaker, known as Nagisa Oshima, was fully conscious of the political nature implied by various events. Moreover, in the state of existence, he has always tried to reflect the political nature. In the 1960s, he intended to manipulate the media and embody politics as he preached, but since "Forced to Die in Japan", he has simply incarnated directly into the media itself to embody radicalism.
2. An exception in the history of Japanese cinema, Nagisa Oshima gazes at the other from the front and creatively takes duels against the other as the subject.
Nagisa Oshima gazes explicitly at the other for the first time in Feeding, describing the crumbling village community in front of the other. As the screenwriter, Tamura ignored Kenzaburo Oe's original work and wrote about the small village in the mountains like a microcosm of the Empire of Japan. The so-called other, in this film, is the enemy soldier, and the film emphasizes the sense of threat of the other for ethnographic reasons, that is, his annoyance originates from the fact that he is black.
After "Feeding", there is no need to describe the enemy anymore, but the framework of others stubbornly survives. Nagisa Oshima insisted on pushing the camera in front of the Japanese who always avoided looking at each other, and actively aimed the camera at the other who was ignored—to put it bluntly, those who were in trouble in Japan's public order and good customs. They are the sons of poor peasants who can only get a chance to express themselves by committing crimes, veterans among The Koreans in Japan, serial rapists who have committed crimes by the same means many times, Vietnamese who were killed by guns on their foreheads, disabled soldiers and their porcelain-touching families... They were unjustifiably driven to the margins of Japanese society, deprived of all opportunities to speak out, and eventually died humbly in poverty. Regardless of their nationality or ethnicity, they are the others that post-war society has been trying to exclude.
Stills from the movie "Feeding".
Nagisa Oshima's gaze at the other reaches its peak in Ritual. Through the wonderful ritual of a teenager returning from puppet Manchukuo, the film depicts the story of Japanese people killing each other and killing each other. From the perspective of Japanese cinema as a whole, one of the uniqueness of Nagisa Oshima is that he broke the taboo of Japanese films not daring to depict the annoying other, and forced the images that Japanese audiences expected to avoid.
3. Nagisa Oshima resolutely rejects melodrama.
This has been made clear since Nagisa Oshima directed his debut film "Street of Love and Hope" in Shochiku Corporation, which has a melodramical system as its basic policy. Most viewers expect a slightly sentimental reconciliation at the end of "Street of Love and Hope", while Nagisa Oshima borrows the rifle in the brother's hand in the play to shoot the teenager's beloved pigeon mercilessly, dissolving the humanitarian melodrama and ending the whole film. It can be said that in fact, from this time on, Shochiku Company's drama of firing Nagisa Oshima under the pretext of the second year's "Night and Fog in Japan" has begun.
From "The Cruel Story of Youth" to "Teenagers", Nagisa Oshima's films have almost degenerated into melodrama many times. But each time he interspersed with absurd irony, not to shed tears, and to bring them to an inexplicable and ambiguous state of mind. "Hanging Death" has been rated as the highest achievement of Brecht-style drama in Japan in Europe and the United States, which sounds a bit of a simple slander, but it is not unfounded. "Joy" is an absurd drama disguised as a farce, and "Summer Sister" is a "meta-film" established on the corpses of countless melodrama. The story told by Nagisa Oshima has no ending in the strict sense of the word. Whether it is "Forced to Die in Love, Summer of Japan" or "Japanese Spring Song Examination", even "Imperial Law Degree" does not have the emotional sublimation that a melodrama should have, but the narrative is suddenly interrupted, and the audience is placed in a place where the plot is unresolved.
In terms of role assignment, Nagisa Oshima, out of extremely maverick standards and strategies, does not provide detailed acting instructions for the actors she finds. It is also closely related to his resistance to melodrama. Whether it's Ichiro Araki in "Japanese Spring Song Kao", Tetsuo Abe in "Shonen", or Takeshi Kitano and Ryuichi Sakamoto in "Merry Christmas on the Battlefield", most of the protagonists in Oshima Nagisa's films are expressionless throughout the film, and do not perform any inner drama at all. They act like lifeless puppets, and it is not possible to fully understand this state of affairs if they are merely defined as the embodiment of the allegorical concept in the director's mind. The rehearsal, which is too brief to be sketchy, and the expression of the wooden chicken, is to stimulate the tension hidden in the actor. In addition, this also allows the audience not to guess the ending as easily as watching the melodrama, so that the audience realizes that the characters transcend the interpretation of inner emotions, and the characters are physical objects composed of opaque substances.
Stills from the movie Merry Christmas on the Battlefield.
4. Nagisa Oshima is neither "correct" nor representative of Japan or Japanese culture.
One need only think about how easily the "giants" who were evaluated and gained popularity at European and American film festivals earlier than Nagisa Oshima were accepted as interpreters of Japanese styles and evaluated in a coordinate axis of exotic and oriental sentiments.
Akira Kurosawa likened the samurai to the moral image of Japan, and Yasujiro Ozu proposed that tatami and tea-made rice were indicators of the simple life of Japan's common people. But Nagisa Oshima will not easily pass on the key images of understanding Japan to overseas as they did. Speaking of which, have foreigners who have seen the absurd "Japanese Spring Song Examination" and "The Secret History of the Tokyo War After the War" successfully gained decent new knowledge related to Japan through these films? Although Set in Okinawa, "Sister of Summer" is very different from the sweaty Okinawan genre, and it does not provide any knowledge and information related to Okinawa at all. "The Kingdom of the Senses" tirelessly depicts the sexual affairs of men and women, but its attitude towards the background of the representation of the times is surprisingly negative.
So, in general, Nagisa Oshima's work does not interpret Japan "correctly" as the Japanese expected. But it's not that he uses a comfortable narrative to interpret the exoticism that European and American audiences expect. He just pointed his camera at Japan, which the Japanese didn't dare look at, especially Japan, which foreigners didn't want to know. Yes, he is a Japanese-born director who makes films in Japanese, but it would be rash to assume that most of his work belongs to the country known as "Japan" just by doing so.
Stills from the movie "The Kingdom of the Senses" (also translated as "Sensory World").
5. Nagisa Oshima, as a film author, broke all imaginable filmmaking systems and left his footprints in every breakthrough.
Nagisa Oshima has been driven out of the circle of big corporate commercial films since he was young. As compensation, he can constantly challenge new attempts in themes, techniques and genres. He is also active on television as a special commentator. As for the phenomenon of Nagisa Oshima's frequent appearance on television in the past 30 years, I think it should be seen as Nagisa Oshima deliberately creating a kind of media: he knows very well that television is the most politicized image, so he does not reject television, and even on the contrary, he uses television as a medium and tries to turn himself into a media.
6. Nagisa Oshima is both a director and a writer. He not only eloquently defended his work, but also resonated with criticism of his contemporaries.
There are many directors who don't write books and don't think it's important to publish them. Nagisa Oshima is an exception in the Japanese film industry, where he has published more than twenty books. In these works, Nagisa Oshima proceeds from his own experience as a director and constantly asks principled questions about image and politics, image and history. Although these criticisms are not academic and systematic, their significance is not merely an indispensable document for understanding his video works. These criticisms took the ethics of cinema in post-war Japanese society as the theme, so they went beyond the simple category of film history and reached the level of social criticism and historical criticism. In his later years, Nagisa Oshima also expanded his horizons to daily life (such as the love of husband and wife, etc.) and wrote many free essays. He even used the extremely personal topic of his own rehabilitation to express his keen observation of the world.
Judging from the fact that he was both a filmmaker and a writer, if you ask who was the forerunner of Nagisaku Oshima, it may only be Itami Mansaku during the Japanese war. From the perspective of the world, only Mosen Makhmalpav of Iran or Jean-Luc Godard of France can match it. As we continue to read the discourse he left behind in the past half century, we cannot but be surprised once again by the solidity of his thesis, the breadth of the subject matter, and the painstaking blood that flows from his words and sentences.
Nagisa Oshima said, "The loser has no image." "It's precisely because people want to see more liberal people that they watch foreign movies. If someone had taken a video of Emperor Showa during the broadcast and broadcast it live on television, the significance of Japan's defeat would have been very different. Nagisa Oshima intuitively uttered this aphorism, which is not just an interpretation of his own video work. For those who explore the relationship between image and politics, this phrase still has great enlightening significance even today. Recall the decadence that has pervaded Japanese film criticism since 1980: the belief that cinema was like pure text, and that only classic films were created—a belief that spread like a contagious disease in Japanese film critics. At that time, it was Nagisa Oshima who was boycotted by critics from the beginning, and the "film as a movement" he called for was an unfortunate episode against the flow of the times. That alone is enough to be remembered.
Original author | Sun: Inuhiko Shikata
Excerpts | Xu Yuedong
Edit | Qingqingzi
Introduction Proofreading | Liu Jun